Thursday, May 5, 2011

RENT in Japanese?

Picture this: 6:45 a.m....a woman with sleepy eyes, squirrely hair, still in pajamas, wearing her comfy white crew socks and comfy Croc sandals.... is informed by her son that his carpool buddy just texted that he can't take him to school this morning....his school that is 40 minutes away..... she has to take him but he wants to do the driving... which means that she's gonna have to slink out of the passenger side and sprint to the driver's side once they reach the school before a well-meaning, dressed-for-work parent tries to engage her in a drop-off conversation..... ('course by then she's incognito in jeans and a tennis cap but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know this outfit was slapped together at the last minute...) And she can't stop for Starbucks on the way home because, again, the dressed-up people are on line there....

So what can make this whole experience worthwhile? I'll tell you what. On the coffee-less way home, her favorite radio station, Sirius XM Broadway, suddenly puts on the opening number from RENT by the Japanese original cast. She can't stop laughing as she bops in her seat to one of her favorite songs... marveling as she catches English words like "friction" and "JoAnn" and "Hey, hey, hey" and "rent" amid all the Japanese. It puts her in the mood to make a Japanese-themed card. But how to justify that? Hmmmm... Eureka! She'll make it a humorous card and send it to the brother that cut the tension on the day of her father's surgery by making her and her mother laugh at his jokes.